Protesting Under Watch: French Streets Face a Government That Barricades Itself In

According to Mediapart, the third day of demonstrations brought out processions across France, contrary to the government's hopes that the movement would run out of steam. Demands against the cost of living and for defending the national education system (the state school system) remain. But, still according to Mediapart, a "sourde colère" (a quiet, simmering anger) is rising against a power that barricades itself behind repression. One protester sums it up, in the paper's headline: "Even marching is becoming difficult."

What we know stops there. The dispatch does not detail the police arrangements, the figures or the arrests here; we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

The underlying question, however, asserts itself. When a procession demands bread and decent classrooms, and is answered with barriers, it discovers as it marches that its opponent is not merely a budget but an apparatus. The Marxist tradition puts it bluntly: police, courts and public finances are not neutral referees; they protect a particular order of property. This apparatus has a relative autonomy and is itself a terrain of struggle, but its limits are set by the need to let capital accumulate. A wage or school demand that lasts therefore ends up hitting that ceiling, and the response becomes a security one.

This is where the slide described by Mediapart takes on its meaning. The right to demonstrate is not a luxury of well-mannered democracy: it is the practical school of the dominated. Rosa Luxemburg insisted on this point: mass movements are born from tiny sparks and teach those who take part faster than any party school could. Obstructing the street is shutting the classroom. Power fears not so much the slogan as the confidence that arises when thousands of people discover that they can hold together.

The old quarrel remains: will the anger turn into lasting organisation, or fade for want of structures? Union leaderships, tempted to negotiate a concession and go home, should weigh the test Luxemburg set: does a measure strengthen the strength and confidence of those below, or demobilise them? A reform wrested away and then reclaimed as soon as profits demand it is nothing but a variable-rate loan.

What must therefore be watched is not only the prefecture's headcounts. It is the assemblies, the committees, the ties forged between teachers, parents and workers, where the street learns to govern itself. A power that barricades itself is a power that admits it fears the outside. And rarely has a door locked from the inside held back the crowd for long.